Hi guys! 🙂 Well it’s that time of the year again where I look back on the year with the website, this blog, the youtube channel, my mod projects, and talk about what’s to come! Sadly the health troubles (which are suspiciously long covid like despite still never catching covid as far as I know) I mentioned in last year’s end of year round up continued into this year resulting in very limited productivity as you don’t get much done when you’re dizzy, brain fogged and tired all the time, so all my energy went into holding my RL job! As a result there isn’t a huge amount done this year to talk about sadly, however the in last few months a nutritionist was able to help me big time with some good supplements and my brain seems to be firing on all cylinders again allowing me to get some stuff done that sets everything up nicely for 2024 where I ‘should’ be releasing all my Civ2 mods and videos finally after all these years in the making.
In last years roundup I talked about how the webcounters at the Blake’s Sanctum website stopped working and while the new one seems to be going okay now I suspect it’s not quite catching everyone as I still see it failing to load sometimes when I visit the site. Nevertheless it’s now 82,959 compared to last years 77,747 so it’s gone up around 5k which is half what the yearly increase used to be. Probably caused by my lack of updates to the site, Google prioritizing mobile friendly websites in search results, and the aforementioned counter issues.
However my wordpress blog here has had a big increase in traffic! Last year I was annoyed about it dropping from the usual 10k visits a year to 5k, however this year has made up for it nicely as its currently sitting on 64,177 hits which is a 13k increase from the 51,000 hits at last years update. I’ve been posting much more news this year which may have helped and I continue to get good hits each week on my old 2017 Star Trek Birth of The Federation 2 projects post, my 2021 Dune 3hr Alternative Edition 4K Fan Cut post, my 2022 Warcraft 2 HD & 3D Remakes post has started becoming popular, and my more recent 2023 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Hack of Streets of Rage 2 post has started gaining momentum too. However just like last year the top post way above them all appears to be my Walking Dead Webisodes post where I try to keep track of where people can watch all these not so well known extra side stories from the WD universe.
As usual all my blog news posts are copied over to my Patreon page too which would increase my news hit totals however Patreon still don’t give any total annual views stats so who knows how many visitors I’ve had there lol. However my friggin awesome Patreon Jack is still with me after another year, so thank you mate! Jack originally started supporting me because of my lost Civilization 2 scenario preservation work which will be hopefully getting some big updates in 2024 as I had some great new Civ2 scenario collection donations given to me this year, so I’m looking forward to seeing what treasures await in them to add to the repository! I already know that some more of the lost scenarios I’d been looking for are in these collections which is great news! Also I must give a special thankyou to Brendan who sent me a huge donation as thanks for (barely) helping him with an OpenIG (Imperium Galactica 1 fan remake) technical issue, that one was a big shock! What a nice guy! 🙂
2022 was a very bad year for my Youtube channel with me barely posting anything due to my ongoing Civilization mod and video work however I did a little bit better in 2023 and managed to post a whole bunch of fun BAR (Total Annihilation fan remake game) videos from LAN parties and as a Christmas gift I’ve just released my Heroes of Might & Magic 2 Civ2 mod tour video! I was originally going to keep it unlisted until I’d finished my main Civ2 tour video but meh it’s Christmas and I wanna end the year by giving my poor long suffering youtube followers something.. anything haha! The channel has 1.3k subscribers which is only about 100 up from the 1.2k a year ago which is no surprise considering my low activity however I’ve got gigs of edited videos almost ready for publishing so hopefully by the end of 2024 I’ll have a whole bunch of cool new Civilization related videos out there for people to enjoy as well as videos on some other interesting things I’ve recorded and have on standby. Sadly because my total public watch hours time is still below 4,000 I still can’t re-monetize the channel which is annoying but hopefully once I push out all the new Civ content that’ll change things! However in the end it’s not the end of the world as I don’t create videos to make money, I create them to share my love of great gaming/modding content with fellow fans!
I said in last years update that I would be releasing all my Civ2 scenarios this year but sadly yet again despite working endlessly on them all I have not been able to get them all done sadly. However all that work has paid off in that I recently released the first and biggest of my big Civ2 scenarios based of Heroes of Might & Magic 2 which means the others (which are in a near finished state) are soon to follow and I have got my big huge Civ2 HD tour video almost finished too which means 2024 will be the year I finally get all this stuff out there to the world! I can’t wait! So stay tuned… 🙂
Well I think that’s enough rambling for this year. As always thank you everyone who has supported my work over the years. Hope you all have a lovely Christmas and news years. Let’s knock down some retro gaming goals in 2024 (as I sure as hell didn’t in 2023 haha)! 😛
Surprisingly I did manage to push through the fog and do a decent bit of work on the Blake’s Sanctum website this year so here’s the latest summary below…
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Have found a interesting up & coming 2024 retro fantasy turn-based 4X strategy indie game called Mystical Conquests that has a very classic Master of Magic like feel plus a bit of Heroes of Might & Magic thrown in too, however the author actually lists Civilization, Age of Wonders and Final Fantasy Tactics as it’s main inspirations. Naturally the game contains all the usual 4X fantasy strategy genre hallmarks of exploring a world map filled with lairs & treasures, building & developing cities, researching new technologies, fighting battles with heroes & armies of creatures, item crafting and spell casting too. The 8bit style graphics and sound give a very nice retro feeling, and the system requirements are accordingly low. If you feel curious about testing & giving the developer some feedback, there is a playable demo available on Steam.
Blake's Sanctum - News 